Small black fine line shamrock outline tattoo with a stem on the inner ankle, shown on pale skin.

Small shamrock outline on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small three-leaf shamrock outline sits on the side of an ankle, drawn in a single thin black line with a stem trailing downward. The linework is clean and even with a slightly hand-drawn, loose quality, and the design is entirely black with no shading. The image is a close, slightly angled shot against a plain skin background, with the tattoo placed off-centre.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The keeper's book said the tower had been roofless since 1641, but the clover didn't care for dates. I found it the week the scaffolding came down, three heart-shaped leaves pushing out of the gap where the old hearth had been, and I knelt in the wet nettles with my notebook open and tried to draw it without lifting the pen.

Keep reading

Nan Doherty had taught me the trick of it when I was a girl. You never lift the pen, she said, or the luck runs out the bottom of the page. I had laughed at her then. Forty years later I was on my knees in the grass at Carrigmore, a castle nobody visited except sheep and the county surveyor, trying to make a line that would not break.

The stem was the hard part. It wanted to keep going, down through the mortar and the fallen stone, and when I followed it with my thumb the ground was softer there, as if something had been dug and filled again. I didn't dig. I wrote a note for the surveyor, then tore it up and wrote it again, because the truth sounded like a fairy story and I was too old to be telling fairy stories to myself.

In the end I left the clover where it grew and drew only the leaves in the notebook, one unbroken line with the stem trailing off the edge of the page. Nan would have said that was the right way. The castle kept its secrets, I kept my pen moving, and when the rain came I walked home with the stem still running down the paper like a question I had decided not to answer.

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